Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  “Put them back,” Tess said again. He did.

  Tess removed a hammer from the backpack and Roxanne began to cry.

  “Shh,” Tess said,“shh.”

  Seymour looked up at Tess and said, “Hey. Hang on—” He nearly named her, but stopped himself.

  The woman, Roxanne, Anna’s mother, wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked first at me and then at Seymour. Said, “Don’t. Please.”

  Seymour stood up straight and released Sam Young’s wrists, who, even after being freed, didn’t move. I thought I saw something go out of his eyes.

  “Will you stop, Sam?” Tess was leaning over him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “No,” Tess said. “No.”

  She ripped the telephone off the wall.

  Then she took a sock from the backpack and stuffed it into his mouth. It was white. One of mine I used for running.

  Seymour had backed away from the table and up against the oven, his pillar of a thigh inches from that woman’s head. There was a sluggishness to him now. I thought, at any moment he will slump down, wrap his arm around her shoulder.

  My heart was coming on fast. I saw straight through his mask, watched him until the black wool was replaced by his lonely face after closing, four whiskies in, standing beneath the neon owl, gazing off into the night, and it was that face abruptly projected upon Seymour’s balaclava that flicked the true starter, flung me over the restraining wall and right into space, hurtling at full speed. I thought, I have to protect him, too. I have to protect all of them. All of us. Even Sam Young. I thought, I will save all of you, and then I dove. Took Sam Young by the throat, Seymour’s move, drove backwards so the chair toppled and I had him bracketed against the floor, my hand a copper pipe clamp, climbed him and, like a high school bully, pressed my knees against his biceps, brought my face right up to his, close enough to smell the alcohol through my mask. He was so hot beneath me and the heat spread through my skin like a terrible disease, flowing from his body into mine and all that time I was speaking to him through my mask saying I-don’t-know-what only that I couldn’t stop talking, that I was pushing those sentences right into his mouth and were it not for that sickening heat between us, the threat of his disease, I might have murdered him right then, might have crushed his windpipe, might never have unclamped his throat, but it was too terrible, more terrible than the tar itself, and somewhere very far away Tess was calling to me, and Seymour too, whose hands were at my shoulders, where his fingers pushed into my skin and muscle and all the way to bone where it all died.

  He yanked me to my feet and there we all were standing again with Sam Young somehow back in his chair, and choking and crying and begging for mercy.

  I was so tired.

  It was gone into air now.

  I had no prayer of saving us. As always and forever.

  Tess was talking. She was furious. “Asshole,” she said, or something like it.

  But it is Seymour I hear most clearly.

  He said in a quite voice, “It is enough.”

  I had never heard him sound like that. So beaten, so depleted.

  But Tess said, “No, goddamn it.”

  And I’m sorry, Dad, but I went where she told me, I did what she asked. I stood behind Sam Young and I held his wrists with all the strength I had left in my body.

  Seymour said it again and stood right up to her, but she didn’t break, didn’t blink, only stared blankly into his chest. Just biding her time.

  Seymour said, “Motherfucker,” and ripped the hammer from her hand. It crashed and went spinning across the floor. He leaned over to me then, put his mouth to my ear and said, “Joe, yes or no?” But I didn’t answer, I didn’t move, and after a few seconds he bent down, helped Sam Young’s wife up from the oven and walked her away from the kitchen.

  Tess continued on as if all was according to plan. She said, “Make a fist, Sam,” and Sam Young made two.

  She picked up the hammer.

  I kept my eyes open.

  She swung hard.

  There was just no mercy in her for that man.

  She went in order.

  She did it four times on the right, one for each knuckle, and she did it as if he weren’t sobbing or struggling against my weight.

  I remember the sound. I promise you that. I remember the sound. His cries. Hers. All those bones crunching under the force of her hammer blows.

  All that noise—muted and razor-clean.

  Tess, the sound is what never recedes.

  She moved on to his left hand, just like she was dropping sinker nails into a plank: one, two, three.

  Smell of urine and bitter sweat.

  Then noise in the living room and I went toward it.

  In the candlelight Seymour was sitting on the couch, his mask still covering his face, and Anna, next to him in her pajamas curled up on her mother’s lap, crying, and Roxanne with her eyes shut saying, “It’s okay, baby girl, it’s okay.”

  I met Seymour’s eyes.

  Anna looked at me in my idiotic mask. “Are you the police?”

  I shook my head. “Sort of,” I said. “Not exactly. Sort of.”

  She sat up then and wiped her nose. “You’re the boyfriend. Why are you wearing that? What are you doing? Is my dad okay?”

  Then Tess came tearing into the room, backpack on, frenetic and pale. Her mouth open, eyes frantic, gaze glancing off each of us, still looking for war, but when she saw Anna, she froze like a frightened buck, relaxed her fists and drew a quick breath.

  When at last she moved, she kneeled and touched Anna’s cheek. She looked up at Roxanne, who remained blank. And then Tess, gentle mother now, said in her quietest voice, “It’s all all right. It’s fine. It’s all okay. It’s a game. Just a game.”

  “Liar,” the girl said, acid in her voice.

  Tess stood up then and, as if she hadn’t heard it at all, bright as she could muster, said, “Good night, Anna Banana.”

  96.

  The three of us were out on the street.

  Tess, me, Seymour. We peeled off our masks, walked away from the house. My face wet. Cool air on my skin.

  We returned home. There was no sense of relief, of satisfaction, of pride. All that ferocious determination departed from Tess.

  Something had broken.

  In our living room, she looked at Seymour with a frightened openness I’d thought was impossible.

  “Are we going to jail?”

  I’d never seen him so angry. He shrugged as if anything could happen. He wouldn’t speak. He drank and smoked and stalked around and shook his head. I thought he might attack her, so I kept myself coiled, not that I’d have been much good if it had come to that. Anyway, I watched him opening and closing his hand until at last he walked away.

  When he’d left, Tess said, “I’m so sorry, Joe.”

  I locked the front door and we went upstairs. I drew her a bath and helped her undress.

  There was blood on her sleeves.

  I put her clothes in a plastic bag the way you’re supposed to, then I came back, turned off the lights and sat next to her on the cold tiles.

  She took my right arm with both her hands and held it against her belly beneath the water.

  There was blood on her wrist.

  She said, “I love you, Joe. I love you so much.”

  “We’ll go away,” I said. “Okay? I promise I’ll protect you. I swear to God, I swear to God I will protect you, Tess.”

  She dug her nails into my arm and began to cry in a hard way I’d never seen. I watched all her fury and conviction dissolve into simple sadness.

  It was many years before we saw Seymour again.

  97.

  It had run out of her. This woman who had forced me to my knees on The Owl’s bathroom floor, who had stalked o
ur streets at night, lectured us with such humor and ferocity.

  Our capricious general, the leader of our misguided campaign, was lost.

  She was so disappointed by our debacle, in herself, in her heart.

  She could never say why it vanished, but I believe that what she thought was both a hunger and capacity for violence was something else entirely and swinging the hammer, punching that man, had neither provided the satisfaction she’d expected nor the energy for future campaigns. Whatever had so possessed her was now absent.

  And I, at least, understood that kind of desertion.

  The colonizing forces inhabit us without warning. They desert us in the same way.

  I know no better way to say it.

  The beasts arrive, the beasts vanish.

  I suppose it is like lust, like passion, like love.

  We turn a corner and are confronted. All those mythic stories of what happens without warning.

  It is something like that.

  Like alcohol without the bottle, heroin without the needle.

  There is no vessel of delivery. It comes from within.

  It works in both directions. What arrives without warning. What leaves.

  In the morning she said, “It’s disappeared, Joe.”

  And after a while of sitting with Tess in bed, seeing what was missing from her eyes, I was sure she was right, that as quickly as it had come, it had vanished.

  Not so much her anger or indignation, but desire. It was the desire she’d lost.

  “It makes no difference,” she said. “What have I done but terrify a little girl and risk Seymour his job, and send us all to jail?”

  But I wasn’t frightened that morning. Now, at last I was able to take care of Tess. She allowed me to hold her. She allowed me to speak. She listened.

  I said, “You were brave to do it. You humiliated him. You broke his hands. You did a thing no one else would have done and maybe he stops. Maybe when he sees the photographs, when he reads your letter.”

  “What letter?”

  The letter we’d never write with the photos we’d never develop folded inside, the letter saying we’d be watching, that if he ever hit his wife again we’d know, that we’d send the pictures to the college, to the Witness. We’d paper White Pine with them. I told her that when the police came, we’d say it had just been us two, no Seymour, that we’d been walking past and heard the screaming. We were protecting a helpless woman and her child.

  “And the hammer, Joe?”

  “What about it? There’s no crime in carrying a hammer.”

  “And your mother? When they find out who your mother is?”

  I said, “The police aren’t going to come, Tess. You’ll see. No way they call the police.”

  “It’s gone,” she said. “Just like that.”

  “What is?” I asked, even though I knew.

  It went on. Her voice going softer and softer.

  I said, “I know what it is for a thing to arrive and disappear so fast. Tess, it’s been happening since before I met you.”

  98.

  Seymour wouldn’t pick up the phone, so just the two of us drove down to Cannon Beach. I’d often imagined proposing to Tess out there in the shadow of Haystack Rock, of returning to the place where I fell in love with her, home to our motel, our exultant origins, but I hated being back there in that colorless town.

  We were fugitives. All the shine was missing. There was no way to recover. No way to reclaim our former selves. This was something we the March family well understood.

  Now Tess was learning the same and I hated that more than anything else.

  I am on my back and Tess is holding onto me as if otherwise she might fly away. I say, “It will return. There are different ways of fighting.”

  I tell her we’ll start over and find those ways, but she doesn’t answer, just digs her fingers in, hangs on tight.

  Though we never did and that was fine with me because all I ever wanted for my life was to live with Tess in a quiet place. Somehow, even before I met her, I think all I ever wanted was to walk with her in the woods and make love and listen to music and read our books and maybe someday have a child.

  All I ever wanted was to construct a life of peace and good systems. To assemble a tender world with her, to nail it together and make it beautiful and organized and safe. And that world would be our fighting back, would be our war against the fools and the cowards, the bullies and the tyrants, the bird and the tar.

  All I wanted was to build a fortress, to create a kingdom with my love.

  For me that would be fighting enough.

  But it never was for Tess. Not in White Pine, not in Seattle, not here on the clearing. From the moment she walked out of Sam Young’s house she believed she had lost some vital, irredeemable thing. In swinging that hammer Tess discovered she was not the warrior she’d imagined herself to be. Nor was she the warrior she wanted my mother to be. And all of that manic enthusiasm, her obsession, her desire, was, all at once, gone.

  99.

  We returned home to White Pine worse than ever. The following days we hid out at home and tried our best to return to our previous life, our previous selves. But it was impossible.

  I never told Tess, but I was sure that any minute we’d be arrested. I dreamed of Sam Young sneering at us from behind two sturdy cops.

  But they never came. The television says not to change behavior after committing a crime, but we never went back to work. We drew the blinds. We drank too much. We barely ate. Tess clung to me as if I might protect her. She had cruel nightmares and woke me with her trembling.

  We stayed in bed and read the paper, but nothing was reported.

  As if we’d never been in that kitchen.

  I said, “You see? We’re going to be fine.”

  Of course, that wasn’t the entire problem.

  “It’s that I don’t ever want to do it again,” she said. “I thought he would be the first, Joe. I thought it was only the start.”

  Tess went to see my mother. I don’t know what happened there. She wanted to go alone.

  When she came back she said, “I told her what I did. I told her I couldn’t do it again, or anything like it. She was cold. She didn’t say anything. I’m sure she’d thought I was one kind of person and now she knows I’m another.”

  I went to see my mother myself.

  I told her we were leaving.

  I said, “Why would you be cruel to Tess?”

  She smiled. She seemed drugged and sad. The early prison charisma was gone. She took my hands off that awful table and raised them to her lips.

  One of the guards turned his head.

  “You’ll come back and see me, Joe?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I wanted to shake her back into her first self. Or into whatever version had raised us. The self that sang to me in the mornings on the way to school, that drove too fast, said, “Sink or swim, fight or die.” The woman of all that light and fire, so severe, so tender, so funny, so sure of her place in the world.

  I said, “What happened? How are we here?”

  She took a long breath, fixed her gaze on my hands, and said, “I don’t know how. There was just that woman, those kids. Then that man, Joe, that goddamn man.”

  Her cheeks were flushed. She pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.

  “Afterwards, for all this time, I thought, somehow I can make it mean something. The letters. The visitors. Tess.”

  “Look at me,” I said.

  She refused and kept on talking. “I thought all of us could make it matter.”

  She shook her head, glanced up, and when I saw the blue of her eyes, I said, “Sometimes I’m on fire and the world is so perfectly clear and I am so bright and alive and I can’t stop moving. And other times, other time
s I’m just the opposite. I wake up and I’m so miserable I can barely see. I can’t move at all. I don’t know what it is or where it comes from.”

  She squeezed my hands tight.

  “Do you have that, Mom? Does any of that happen to you?”

  She sighed and looked at something behind me while I studied her mouth. I waited for her, for some absolute conclusion, some explanation, a final answer, a last and crucial bond. I waited and waited. I waited until I thought I would take her shoulders in my hands and shake it out of her but when at last she returned, she only said, “Me, Joey Boy, I can always move.”

  100.

  We packed the truck and left our home. Not much ceremony. Perhaps we passed by my father’s place when we drove out of town, but I don’t remember it that way.

  We pulled off to the side of the ridge road. We looked down on White Pine.

  We found the roof of what was no longer our house. We found Vista and the trampoline. We found the college and the meetinghouse. We found Lester’s and, in the other direction, the prison surrounded by those dazzling green wheat fields.

  Then we drove out to the highway and left as if we’d never lived there at all.

  101.

  Once we lived in a motel in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Once we lived in a white house in White Pine, Washington. Once we lived down in Belltown. Once in a pretty apartment in Capitol Hill.

  Once we moved to the country.

  And for a time we told ourselves we were still warriors. In those years after White Pine, before we became business owners, before we became entrepreneurs, we said we were radicals and artists. We would organize and write poems and songs and perform them and spend our time in dark clubs listening to angry musicians play angry music.

  And we would call all of it fighting. Art our weapon and all that nonsense.

  Neither of us believed in any of it. Sam Young was a poison, our crime a festering gash. Tess’s passion turned hollow. Her conviction was still gone.